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Secret Intelligence

The two chief purposes of secret intelligence activity abroad are to

provide governments with valuable information unobtainable from open
sources and covertly to weaken or eliminate their foreign enemies – be
they shipping-lane pirates, serious organized criminal gangs, dissidents
living abroad, terrorist organizations, or even hostile governments.
However, as the consequences of military and terrorist surprise have
become more deadly, secret intelligence has also increased the attention
it pays to the allies on which particular reliance is placed – for govern-
ments feel the need to be sure of their friends. These objectives have
some overlap with those of diplomacy, while intelligence officers have
also come to rely more and more on the shelter provided by diplomatic
missions and consulates. But diplomacy itself rests on the maintenance
of normal relations between even unfriendly governments and operates
under a legal regime proscribing espionage, let alone active interference
in the internal affairs of other states. In such circumstances, how do the
spies and the diplomats coexist? With difficulty, as we shall see – but
coexist they do.
The association of secret intelligence with diplomacy is as old as
diplomacy itself. This is because diplomats – planted at the heart of
foreign power centres and whether by religious injunction or codes
of hospitality afforded some protection in their work – were usually
the best placed of all agents of any political entity to obtain sensi-
tive information. Furthermore, until comparatively recently they
were largely on their own because the only dedicated spies or ‘intel-
ligencers’ tended to be occasional freelancers who sold information
to the highest bidder. Separate, state-funded intelligence agencies as
we know them today did not begin to emerge until the end of the
nineteenth century.

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© G. R. Berridge 2015
 Secret Intelligence 151

The risks of espionage were, however, only rarely taken directly by

an ambassador himself, whose efficient discharge of his other duties
depended on the maintenance of good relations with the receiving
government. His personal pursuit of information tended to consist
instead chiefly of quizzing all those with whom he came into offi-
cial contact (including other members of the diplomatic corps), while
encouraging them to open up by offering some titbits in exchange,
together with copious quantities of food and wine. But at some posts
he routinely bribed ministers or court officials for information, even
keeping important ones on a regular ‘pension’, and he was not above
paying for the theft of documents and codes (Andrew: 1–3); in some
diplomatic services he was able to submit claims for these as ‘extraor-
dinary’ expenses. Consular officers, familiar figures in a dockyard, were
also routinely instructed to keep a weather eye open for developments
of military significance, as in the case of the British consuls in southern
Russia in the late 1850s, when fears began to grow in London that
St Petersburg was seeking to evade the humiliating clauses of the Treaty
of Paris of 1856 – imposed on it following the Crimean War – that
prohibited it from rebuilding its Black Sea fleet (Berridge 2013a: 61–2).
Heads of mission had their own codes and were usually adept at getting
home intelligence reports as swiftly and securely as possible, if necessary
by an official messenger or other ‘safe hand’.
It was during the late nineteenth century that diplomats – with a
collective sigh of relief – began to seek and sometimes secure more of an
arm’s length relationship with the ‘dirty’ world of secret intelligence. This
was a result of two developments: first, the appearance in the embassy
of the military attaché (with the later arrival of naval and air attachés,
these came to be known collectively as service or defence attachés); and
second, the emergence of the separate foreign intelligence agency. How
did the relationship between diplomacy and secret intelligence evolve
following these developments? What are the main problems caused by
the inability of diplomacy to shake off its intimacy with the ‘spooks’?

Service attachés

In the late seventeenth century, the great scholar-diplomat Abraham de

Wicquefort – as it happens, also himself an intelligencer – had advised
the appointment of military officers to embassies where the ambas-
sador was at constant risk of being invited by the local ruler to join him
on a military expedition. Such an officer, he pointed out, if available
as a substitute, would not only be more ‘capable of judging of martial